Online education aside, he proposes assessing cooperation instead of comparison. That shouldn't be confused with collaboration which he labels as the "school-level emulation of the creation of cliques and corporations." No, he wants to measure how much students contribute to the common good -- a large-scale abstracted Wikipedia if you will. And it's not limited to K-12 students; offering open, peer-reviewed online courses should be a requirement of PhD education, says Mr. Downes.

We sense more than a little social engineering here but alas, what is education? The switch in semantics is thought-provoking -- it teases out some really hard questions about human nature. After all, we can only hope that in Mr. Downes world we don't move from a society of cheaters to one of freeloaders!

Online education aside, he proposes assessing cooperation instead of comparison. That shouldn't be confused with collaboration which he labels as the "school-level emulation of the creation of cliques and corporations." No, he wants to measure how much students contribute to the common good -- a large-scale abstracted Wikipedia if you will. And it's not limited to K-12 students; offering open, peer-reviewed online courses should be a requirement of PhD education, says Mr. Downes.

We sense more than a little social engineering here but alas, what is education? The switch in semantics is thought-provoking -- it teases out some really hard questions about human nature. After all, we can only hope that in Mr. Downes world we don't move from a society of cheaters to one of freeloaders!